The Mono Craters are an elongated, 17 km long group of lava domes, cinder cones and maars on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada between Mono Lake and Long Valley caldera, California. The last eruption at the Mono Craters took place about 600 years ago, nearly contemporaneously with the eruptions from Inyo Craters to the south. It formed tephra rings and obsidian lava domes, lava flows and locally extensive ash and pumice layers. The most known crater of the group is Panum crater.
Beschreibung:
The volcanic field is associated with an extension of the crust in a tectonic basin on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. Explosive eruptions started more than 50,000 years ago, but almost all of the exposed domes and flows are less than 10,000 years old. In the past few 1000 years, activity has shifted both to the north and south from the center of the chain.
